Gore Vidal

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Born to power, Vidal was one of America's leading writers, wits and provocateurs for half a century. A combative voice on the left, Vidal — who had affairs with men and women — also was among the first American novelists to write unapologetically of gay love and sex.     

          

 

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

In Christopher Bram's Eminent Outlaws, a new book that traces the lives of gay writers of the past century, he leads off his book with the story of Vidal's return from World War II:

The second atom bomb fell on Nagasaki, the war ended, and nineteen-year-old Eugene Gore Vidal came home to New York. The boyish prep school graduate had served as a warrant officer on an army ship in the Aleutians, a sort of seagoing sergeant. He was now stationed out on Long Island before being discharged. He brought with him a manuscript he had begun writing in training camp, a Hemingway-like novel titled Williwaw about shipboard life.
He spent his weekends in the city .... There he met other men in uniform in the male-only half of the busy bar at the Astor hotel or at the movie theaters crowded along Forty-second Street. ... He would later insist that the only man he ever loved was a classmate at St. Albans, Jimmie Trimble, who died on Iwo Jima.

Later in the book, Bram quotes from the most memorable night of the 1968 debates between Vidal and conservative editor William F. Buckley, which fell on the night that the violence of the Chicago police and protesters at the Democratic National Convention had been broadcast across the nation: